Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married yoke who worked as computer
operations team members at Stanford University, later joined nearby
Richard Troiano, founded Cisco Systems in 1984. Lerner moved on
to command linux doc at Schlumberger, stirring entire yet to
Cisco in 1987. The big name "Cisco" was derived from the city high regard,
San Francisco, which is why the circle's engineers insisted on
using the lower instance "cisco" in the early days. For Cisco's earliest
output, Bosack adapted multiple-protocol router software from the beginning
written some years before on William Yeager, another Stanford hand
who later joined Sunbathe Microsystems. The retinue's foremost CEO was Bill
Graves, who held the stance from 1987 to 1988. In 1988, John Morgridge
was appointed CEO, and succeeded in 1995 via John Chambers.

While Cisco was not the basic party to expose and push a router, it
was one of the pre-eminent to flog betray commercially in the money routers supporting
multiple network protocols. As the Internet Protocol Security became thoroughly
adopted, the note of multi-protocol routing declined. Today, Cisco's
largest routers are especially cast-off to yield IP packets.

On February 16 1990, the retinue went following (with a market capitalization
of $224 million) and was listed on the Nasdaq house exchange. On August 28, 1990,
Lerner was fired; upon hearing the expos‚, Bosack resigned to conduct his funding in search her.
Bosack and his wife walked away from Cisco with $170 million, 70% of which was
committed to charities. The two later divorced.

Cisco acquired a medley of companies to attract in products and ingenuity into the
company. In 1995-1996 the company completed 11 acquisitions. Divers acquisitions,
such as Stratacom, were the biggest deals in the effort when they occurred.
During the Internet blast in 1999, the company acquired Cerent Corporation,
a start-up company located in Petaluma, California, representing about US$7 billion.
It was the most high-priced procurement made by means of Cisco to antiquated, and at best the
obtaining of Well-controlled Atlanta has been larger. A few acquired companies
include grown into $1Bn+ business units in the service of Cisco, including LAN switching,
Adventurousness Utter over Internet Conduct (VOIP), and accommodations networking. Cisco
acquired Linksys in 2003.

In recent Walk 2000, at the crest of the dot-com increase, Cisco doc was the most
valuable gathering in the world, with a market capitalization of more than
US$500 billion. In July 2009, with a exchange lid of about US$108.03 billion,
it is unmoving one of the most valuable companies.

The comrades was a 2002-03 heiress of the Ron Brown Award, a U.S.
presidential honor to recognize companies "in search the meritorious property
of their relationships with employees and communities".